The 26th Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which is also known as Outfest 2008, is wrapping up today, but the cinematic winners of this year's fest have already been announced during an awards ceremony last night in Hollywood. In the list of winners, there are some familiar names, plus some other films that might be worth keeping an eye out for.

The awards were led by Were the World Mine, which won Outstanding US Dramatic Feature. The film focuses on an all-boys school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (and for those Twin Peaks fans out there, the crazy Nadine, Wendy Robie, pops up). On the international side of things is the excellent XXY, which I reviewed from TIFF last year. It is no surprise that this film nabbed the Best International Dramatic Feature prize, to add to its ever-growing list of nominations and wins. It's really, really worth your time.

Other winners include Hamlet 2, Sex Positive, Dream Boy, and Countertransference. To check out more of the winners, head to The Hollywood Reporter for a run-down.

I'm typically a fan of all the movie-related stamps produced by the U.S. Postal Service, and I'm very glad to read the news that important early African American movie stars are being recognized and celebrated with a new series of 42-cent stamps (see them all here). However, I am a little disappointed that it carries on the usual exclusion of mostly forgotten non-musical race films, which are a significant part of both film history and African American history. Considering the stamps are tagged "Black Cinema USA," a number of people may assume this was the height of what African Americans were offered in the first half of the 20th century (Oscar Micheaux deserves a stamp).

Gripes aside, though, it is nonetheless a wonderful set. The five stamps feature vintage poster designs from old movies starring musical artists Josephine Baker (Princess Tam-Tam), Duke Ellington (Black and Tan) and Louis Jordan (Caldonia), plus King Vidor's monumental Oscar-nominated musical, Hallelujah! (it was one of the rare studio films featuring an all black cast) and the 1921 silent film The Sport of the Gods. In previous, separate years, Showboat costars Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel have also received their own postage stamps.

The new stamps come out Wednesday and there will be a ceremony on their behalf that day at the Newark Museum, which is currently holding the 34th annual Newark Black Film Festival. The festival is also holding free screenings of Hallelujah on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Even when I started following the industry obsessively, I always wondered how it came to be that by October or November of each year, there would always be a fairly clear picture of who the Oscar "frontrunners" were, which films were falling out of the race, and sometimes even which movies are "locks" in certain categories I figured the buzz had to start somewhere -- and that to some extent, the tail had to be wagging the dog.

Maybe it starts with glowing advance Hollywood Reporter reviews. Consider Ray Bennett on Meryl Streep in the ABBA musical Mamma Mia!, due July 18th: "Streep is sensationally good in rendering the whole yarn credible and in making dramatically moving songs such as 'Slipping Through My Fingers,' sung to her departing daughter, and 'The Winner Takes It All' to a lost love. It's no stretch to think of her performance in Oscar terms, ranking with previous musical winners such as Liza Minnelli, Barbra Streisand and Catherine Zeta-Jones."

So: is this that fabled "Oscar buzz" we keep hearing about, or just one dude sounding off about a movie he liked? Is this the first step toward Streep being a "Best Actress lock" come December? I wouldn't have put Mamma Mia! (or, for that matter, The Dark Knight) on my Oscar shortlist a few months ago -- looks too silly! The release date's all wrong! But I guess now that I've read The Hollywood Reporter, I'm supposed to think it's a contender. Right?

Or did you know that all along?

I'm sure everyone expected The Dark Knight to close with a Heath Ledger "in memoriam" after the fade to black. So it will. Warner Bros. has released the text of the dedication that will accompany the film, and it reads:


Wickliffe (the IMDb has him as "Comway" but other sources, as well as the dedication, say "Conway") is the Maori special-effects technician who was killed in a stunt car accident last September. He was on a camera truck following the Batmobile around a racetrack when the truck spun out of control and crashed into a tree.
It's very classy of Chris Nolan & Co., I think, to tribute Wickliffe in the same line as the far more famous and publicly-mourned Ledger. Their whole handling of Ledger's death has been on the money; they haven't shied away from showcasing his performance in the marketing, but nor have they given the slightest indication that they're attempting to exploit its profile. The result: going to see the movie doesn't feel the least bit skeevy or off, at least for me.

I am a bit concerned about the possible posthumous Oscar campaign though, especially after Peter Travers semi-officially got it off the ground last week. Since Ledger almost certainly wouldn't have had a shot at it for this role were he still alive, I'm afraid the notion of the "posthumous Oscar" would overwhelm his actual performance, which looks fantastic.

Did you know the Saturn Awards were last night? I sure didn't! You'll remember the Saturn Awards as where William Shatner did his famous rendition of "Rocketman" back in 1978. The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has given them out to the best in genre cinema for 34 years now, and this year's picks are ... kind of strange.

The prize for Best Fantasy Film went to Enchanted, which I think is silly in a category that also included Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Stardust, but okay. Then Sweeney Todd took Best Horror Film, which seems to me like a way to avoid giving an award to an actual horror film, like fellow competitors 30 Days of Night, 1408 and The Mist. I guess I can see why Sweeney Todd would be classified as "horror" -- a lot of throats get slit, after all -- but it's a stretch. Then the kicker: Cloverfield wins Best Science-Fiction Film, beating out, among others, Sunshine. The problem is that not only is Cloverfield not a science-fiction film, it's in some ways the opposite of a science-fiction film. Science-fiction entails some sort of larger cosmic context for the fantastic goings-on, which is precisely what Cloverfield refuses to provide. It's a monster movie in its purest form -- horror, not sci-fi.

Were you aware that when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented the Oscars every year, the results were being determined without considering the opinion of Jet Li? It's hard to believe, I know. They haven't been consulting Diablo Cody (pictured), either! Well, that egregious oversight is about to be remedied, as Li, Cody, and 103 others have been invited to join the AMPAS and become voting members.

Among those whom you'll be able to blame the next time something dumb like Crash wins Best Picture are Gore Verbinski, Doug Liman, Allison Janney, Judd Apatow and Sacha Baron Cohen -- assuming they all accept the invitation, of course. Almost everyone who's invited is grateful for the honor, but a few do decline, and a few more simply fail to respond to the invitation before the deadline.

Each June, the American Film Institute convenes the Silverdocs Film Festival (they like to spell it in all caps, SILVERDOCS) in the Washington, DC suburbs. The festival, presented in partnership with the Discovery Channel, is actually a full-blown documentary conference, and it gives out sizable cash prizes to the winners of its awards. Cinematical missed the fest this year (though we did manage to notice their interesting choice to honor Spike Lee), but we figured we'd tell you about the results.

The grand prize for a US feature -- a handsome ten grand plus a lot of expensive film stock from Kodak -- went to Scott Hamilton Kennedy (2002's OT: Our Town) for The Garden. The movie told the story of the South Central Farm -- a 14-acre community garden that sprung up at the site of the 1992 LA Riots. Kennedy chronicles the farmers' battle with landlords, the city of Los Angeles, and the courts.

Last week, I did some reporting from the CineVegas Film Festival, where I served as a juror. The winners were announced this weekend, and they have me wishing I had been able to see more stuff. She Unfolds By Day, Rolf Belgum's film about "a frustrated middle-aged son trying to manage his misanthropic 80-year-old mother," took home the Grand Jury Prize. A Special Jury Award went to Dark Streets, which our own Eric D. Snider gave a decent review to here. Bill Pullman took home a Special Jury Award for his performance in Your Name Here, reviewed by Eric here. The documentary jury, which included Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock, selected Beautiful Losers, about "the lives of a loose-knit group of artists in the '80s who created their own art movement outside the mainstream." Hi, My Name is Ryan, focusing on "the clown prince of the downtown Phoenix art scene," picked up a Special Documentary Jury Prize.

Well, well. Here's some welcome news. After this year's much balleyhooed disaster with the Best Foreign Film Oscar noms -- recap: lauded Romanian Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days somehow didn't even make it onto the Oscar shortlist -- The Envelope's Mark Olsen reports that a rule change has been voted in for next year's event. Now, I don't like to get too worked up about the Oscars -- it's such an insidery, backpatting schmoozefest of the "You're great!" "No, you're great!" variety -- but last year's foreign noms really pissed me off.

I wasn't as enarmored of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days as many of my fellow critics were, but even so, it's a masterful, tensely drawn piece of filmmaking, it won the Palme d'or and gave critics worldwide a collective cinematic orgasm, and it damn sure deserved not just to be shortlisted, but to make the final cut of nominees. That it wasn't nominated was a travesty, and confirmed the ongoing suspicion of many in the film community that many of the people in the Academy who are charged with making decisions around foreign film noms are a pack of drooling idiots.

The timing is perfect. He kicked his demons to the curb a while ago, and now Robert Downey Jr. is riding high on great performances and sweet gigs like Tony Stark and Iron Man heroics, plus some Zodiac killing, and extra-furriness with Diane Arbus. And now, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has announced that he is one of the recipients for a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

Joining Downey Jr. on the cinematic side of things is Tinkerbell (presumably due to the new movies coming out), Tim Burton, Leslie Caron, Cameron Diaz, Charles Durning, Ralph Fiennes, Hugh Jackman, Sir Ben Kingsley, and William H. Macy. You know that it's a tough accolade to capture when you can become knighted before receiving a star.

The dates that the stars will be revealed hasn't been determined, but they will happen some time in 2009. In the meantime, we can watch Downey Jr. change his race for the world of cinema in Tropic Thunder, which opens on August 15.